Well I would like to let the cat out of the bag and just start off by saying compressed lossless formats fail in comparison to WAV or AIFF. Now i am aware that this is just my humble opinion, and if you don't agree that's fine. There are other threads here that you can go argue that back and forth. I know people mention that flac and m4a and whatnot are mathematically identical to an uncompressed lossless audio file, well for my money I would say that monkey audio’s theory page might just make you think differently about statements like that as well…http://www.monkeysaudio.com/theory.html
But enough about silliness like that. Some of you are just convinced by your own ears that WAV is the way to go. Which brings me to the crux of the matter…why does WAV, which is supposedly raw pcm data, have more depth and clarity to my ear, than AIFF, which is raw pcm data? It is sometimes so subtle a difference that I wonder if I am just making this up, but it nags at me that I may be making the wrong choice in AIFF. Now I only bring this up because AIFF has id tags, e.i. metadata that can be read by iTunes, whereas WAV does not. Why in god’s name anybody would make a music format that does not have metadata is beyond me, and damn them for it, but alas Microsoft will probably remain the in the dark for some time. Moving on, has anyone done studies on this phenomenon of WAV vs. AIFF? Could it be due to my windows architecture that WAV sounds better? In that if I were to switch to a mac output, would AIFF have some sort of magical upper hand? Or rather, is it like a fun mp3 test, where if one creates a high a quality mp3 file as is possible in iTunes, it bears characteristics of purity that emphasize certain moments that make it sound even better than a WAV file? (yea it’s a fun test, try it sometime). Or are we all just hearing things?